About the Book

Seers featured prominently in ancient Greek culture, but they rarely appear in archaic and classical colonial discourse. Margaret Foster exposes the ideological motivations behind this discrepancy and reveals how colonial discourse privileged the city’s founder and his dependence on Delphi, the colonial oracle par excellence, at the expense of the independent seer. Investigating a sequence of literary texts, Foster explores the tactics the Greeks devised both to leverage and suppress the extraordinary cultural capital of seers. The first cultural history of the seer, The Seer and the City illuminates the contests between religious and political powers in archaic and classical Greece.

About the Author

Reviews

"Foster’s central observation about the striking absence of a certain style of religious expert where we might well expect them is new and important for historians of ancient religion and colonialism alike. So too, her writing is clear and the overall argument is well-constructed."—Reading Religion

"It is not easy to write successful ‘cultural poetics’ work because one is bound to enter a variety of different fields, but this is done deftly here. The results are excellent and raise important questions for many different areas of scholarship."—Nigel Nicholson, Walter Mintz Professor of Classics, Reed College

"This book makes an important intervention into our understanding of the incredibly rich and relatively untapped collection of material that can be called the discourse of the seer by focusing on and elaborating the ways that the Greeks imagined the seer rather than on the instrumental and functional details of how prophecy worked in archaic and classical Greece."—Carol Dougherty, Professor of Classical Studies, Wellesley College

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Conventions and Abbreviations

Introduction 1. Beyond Entrails and Omens: Herodotus’s Teisamenos and the Talismanic Seer at War 2. Sailing to Sicily: Theoklymenos and Odysseus in the Odyssey 3. Suppressing the Seer in Colonial Discourse: Delphic Consultations and the Seer in the City 4. Th e Disappearance of Melampous in Bacchylides’ Ode 11 5. Hagesias as Sunoikister: Mantic Authority and Colonial Ideology in Pindar’s Olympian 6 6. Amphiaraos, Alkmaion, and Delphi’s Oracular Monopoly Conclusion